Flash in the Peg

Adobe has released a public beta of ColdFusion 8. You can get it at Adobe Labs.

Hi everybody, hope you’ve all had a great spring! My apologies for not being quicker in planning our second meeting, and for the rather short notice - we were on vacation for a while, and the time sort of slipped away.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 at Red River College, Princess Street campus (room TBA). We’ll take a look at a couple of really cool Javascript-based methods of integrating Flash content into web sites. These methods are standards-compliant, accessible, and search engine-friendly. And they’re very easy to use, so even if you don’t know any Javascript, you can use these methods to really enrich your sites with very little effort.

And, thanks to the good folks at FITC, we’ll be raffling off a free admission to this year’s FITC Winnipeg roadshow event to one lucky attendee!

The first bit of Javascript we’ll look at is Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject. One advantage of SWFObject over the standard method of embedding Flash content is that it lets you specify alternate content that is viewable to those who don’t have the Flash player installed. This content can also be crawled by search engines. By way of example, we’ll look at using SWFObject to add a Flash navigation bar to an HTML site.

The second method we’ll look at is sIFR. You know that you can use CSS to specify what fonts should be used to display HTML content, but ultimately you’re at the mercy of a relatively short list of common fonts. sIFR combines the power of Flash and Javascript to display small snippets of text (like headers and small quotes) in whatever font your design requires. We’ll look at how easy it is to get sIFR up and running.

If you can make it out, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know by email at darren@flashinthepeg.org. I hope to see you on June 7th!

This is slightly old news, but I’m catching up on a few things, so I thought I’d post this in case you missed the news: Freehand is officially kaput.